Ablative Brain Surgery

Ablative brain surgery, also known as brain lesioning, is the surgical ablation of brain tissue by various methods to treat neurological or psychological disorders. The lesions it creates are irreversible, most often targeting the motor thalamus, globus pallidus, or subthalamic nucleus. The approach was pioneered by the French physiologist Pierre Flourens, who performed experimental ablation on animals in the nineteenth century to study brain function by observing the resulting changes in behavior, and it remains a research tool in neurobiology even though experimental ablation on humans is considered unethical.